How I Became a Berean

From 1953 until my retirement in 1993 I taught classical inductive Bible Study at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. There I coached students to be like the Bereans spoken of in Acts 17:11, who insisted on examining the Scriptures for themselves before agreeing even with the apostle Paul's interpretations of them. My basic hermeneutics course led students through Phil. 1:3--2:30 for handling discourse and Jonah for handling narrative.

I first learned some elements of letting the Bible speak for itself in l946-47 from Dr. Howard T. Kuist, professor of English Bible at Princeton Theological Seminary. One of the texts Kuist used was Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939; rev. ed., 1971). Adler argued that books (dead teachers) are better for grasping concepts than lectures (live teachers), "where [too often] the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either" (p. 51). This meant devoting class time largely to coaching students in how to grasp an author's intended meaning from the verbal symbols in a text.

Early in his course Dr. Kuist related an anecdote about Louis Agassiz (1807--1883) when he was a professor of natural history at Harvard. This story produced a most profound change in my strategy for studying the Bible. It made me realize how diligently I must scrutinize a Bible passage to see just what is there and try to forget what I had previously heard or read about that passage.